Years of Poems and Spirits

We got a late morning start. Just woke up late thinking we would have plenty of time to visit the Roman Forum and Colosseum. After we had our morning pastries and cappuccino, we were in for a surprise: all metro (subway) entrances were shut closed. Apparently, we were hit by a labor strike.

After some confusion and seeing large crowds wandering on the street seeking alternative transportations, we were very lucky to have found an empty cab.

The capital hill museum has the famed bronze she-wolf statue. We didn’t realize that the two baby Roman founding brothers were added later. This was confirmed when we visited the National Museum near Termini later, where we saw ancient (4 century BC) coins had the same she-wolf but no sucking babies. Song particularly liked a sculpture that depicts a youth picking out a spike in his foot. We both admired the “dying Gaul” by Bernini (?)

After having a lunch at the museum’s roof top cafe. We toured the Roman Forum and the Colosseum, almost next to each other. The Forum didn’t have too many thing left standing. All we saw were building foundations or lower layers of stones or pedestals of columns that suggested something grandiose before.

One except was Constantine basilica. I didn’t realize how big it was until seeing in person. Although only less than one third of the original building are still standing, you look up and around, still feeling like standing in a open jumbo jet henger: it was simply huuuge.

Comparatively speaking, the Colosseum was much better preserved. Thanks to a Pope who decided, instead of pulling stones from it to build new churches, he made it a Christian worship site. When we entered we saw a huge meta cross bearing Latin (or Italian) scripts about John Paul II. Not sure he just blessed it or also paid for some projects there.

The Colosseum was about what I’ve read or seen before. No surprises there. The area used to be open to tourists that one could walk across on a wooden deck, looking up and imagine the madness there must have been at the same spacial dimension of the universe. But it was closed when we were there for some archeological work. You see this type of the project all the time in Rome. Some college students in Calvin Kline top working in a fenced hole full of old stones and tourists snapping pictures like watching Xing Xing the panda in national zoo.

Sunset was great, so we took a lot pictures. On our way back, one of the two Roman subway resumed operation. The other still closed. We had to hail a cab but the guy charged us at least twice than usual. In broken English, he kept shaking his head saying, “Strike. No train. Not possible.” Not sure what he meant. But I guess this is how market economy works after a socialist event.